“This winter hasn’t been very wintry,” I said to my boyfriend the other day. “When is it going to get cold?”

“It might not this year,” he said. “Because of El Niño. It could last all year.”

Where I’m from – Rochester, NY – this would be unheard of. There, the four seasons come like clockwork. Imagine it just not getting cold one year!

Yet in Lima this isn’t unusual.

In Peru, incredible things happen as if they’re totally commonplace.

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In Piura, the rain once fell so hard that it formed a lake that didn’t dry up for two years.

After his grandmother died, my friend here in Lima told me, his grandfather cried every single day for the next twenty years.

In the Andes, the Incas built a network of cities miles apart that are perfectly lined up with each other as well as north-south and east-west. They built optical illusions into the architecture, with hallways that look like they get smaller at both ends, out of massive boulders on cliff-steep terrain.

It’s no wonder magical realism came from Latin America.

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I used to think life was pretty much the same everywhere you went.

Sure, it would smell different. The people would have a different history, different customs and beliefs. But overall, humans were humans and life was life.

On some level that’s still true. No matter where you go, you’ll hear stories of love, loss, anger, sadness, hope. Of keeping the kitchen clean, of the pleasure of children and dogs playing. Some things are universal.

But I’ve learned that some places have another quality. Here in Latin America, I’ve seen a strangeness, a beauty and a mystery that makes magical realism seem less like a quirky literary technique and more like everyday life.

Now, it feels less like the result of someone’s vivid imagination, and more like…just reporting what happened.

Coming from the U.S., where many of us are taught to be pragmatic and literal, rigid even (but punctual!), I sometimes forget that that’s not the only way to experience the world.

Maybe magic does exist. Maybe it’s just a matter of looking for it.

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Have you ever traveled and discovered something totally different from what you believed? What was it?